My Barbarian

My interview interview with My Barbarian was published in The Fanzine. A must read for any lovers of performance art or experimental theater.

Narrowcast

originally published in the January issue of The Magazine

Narrowcast: Reframing Global Video 1968/2008
LACE
6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles
(323) 957-1777
www.artleak.org

By Jesi Khadivi

In a recent episode of Planet in Peril on CNN, correspondent Lisa Ling met with the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger River Delta, also known as MEND, on the banks of a remote shore on the delta. Adrenalin was high and gun-fire filled the air as Ling gave a straight forward analysis of a region whose ecosystem had been virtually decimated by big oil companies.

Artist Mark Boulos also explores the indignity suffered by Nigerians in the hands of companies like Shell oil. His two-channel video, All That is Solid Melts into Air, which posits footage of Nigerian rebels preparing for battle against the frenzied activity of the Chicago Stock Exchange trading floor, offers more nuanced insight into dispossession and power than the Planet in Peril team could dream of. All That is Solid…, which derives its title from Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, beautifully encapsulates the radical potential of video art, as well as its capacity for non-linear story telling.

Narrowcast revisits LACE’s seminal 1986 exhibition, Resolution: A Critique of Video Art. It is less a critique and more a celebration of video’s possibilities and the evolution of the form, especially as a political tool. In Political Advertisement I (1952-1984) Antonio Muntades and Marshall Reese show political ads transform from direct address to feel good sloganeering, and finally, to outright manipulation and scare tactics. Natalie Bookchin’s video Trip, comprised entirely of found footage from YouTube, explores international borderlands and the binaries that blossom there. Shot primarily on low grade consumer video devices like phones and cameras, Bookchin’s video consists of home made road movies from over seventy countries. Artur Zmijewski’s Game of Tag takes on a heightened significance when it is revealed at the end of the video that the naked game of tag is being played in the gas chamber of a former concentration camp.

In All That is Solid Melts into Air, a Nigerian militia member sternly advised Mark Boulos, “Make them remember us.” Though typically a concern associated with documentary film making, all the artists in Narrowcast engage with issues of memory and representation that are subtle, incisive and fresh, whether the film was made in 1986 or 2008.

Hung Liu @ Walter Maciel

My review of Hung Liu @ the Walter Maciel Gallery was published by The Magazine. Check it out online or find it at a local LA gallery or newstand.

Hung Liu
Rat Years 1948 1960 1972 1984 1996 2008
Walter Maciel Gallery
2642 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles
(310) 839-1840 www.waltermacielgallery.com

Rat Years 1948 1960 1972 1984 1996 2008

Chinese astrology is organized in twelve-year cycles. Each year is named after an animal, and each animal has symbolic associations believed to shape the tenor of the year.

Chinese-American artist Hung Liu was born in the year of the rat, an animal the Chinese associate with prosperity, order, aggression, war, death, and pestilence. Now in her sixth rat year, Liu has significantly shifted her focus inward for an exhibition of self-portraits, a marked departure from the meta-historical portraiture and abstract work she is best known for. Each piece is painted from a photograph taken during a rat year and accompanied by a digitally rendered painting of a drawing made at the age she was in the portrait. While the formula of pairing self-portraits with old drawings is simple, in this case it works. Liu's formal mastery lends her paintings a distinctive gravity. Painted on unprimed linen, the brushstrokes evoke the sketchy quality of a graphite drawing. When combined with the rich colors she uses to offset small details (a cape, scarf, or brooch), a dazzling play of textures ensues.

Though her self-portraits are intimate and compelling, Liu's Rat King series steals the show. A rat king is a mythic group of rats that live their entire lives bound together by their tangled tails, cemented by dirt, blood, and excrement. Liu began thinking of the folkloric rat colonies in the wake of the earthquake that decimated the Sichuan Province shortly before her trip to Beijing this year. The pastel-hued Rat King II is practically transcendental. Tails delicately twist together like a bouquet, the pale, half-erased rats seem like they are being beckoned to a spirit world. Rat King 1, on the other hand, is a broody, realistic depiction of a rat king preserved at the scientific museum, Mauritianum, in Altenburg, Germany. The image is darkly beguiling and violent, evoking myriad situations where humans are trapped by their conditions, whether political, social, or environmental.
by Jesi Khadivi